Taking Names

Gabor and IRS

The lawyer for Zsa Zsa Gabor blames convicted swindler Bernard Madoff for a hefty tax bill owed by his client.

According to documents obtained by Associated Press last week, the Internal Revenue Service filed a lien of more than $118,000 for the years 2001 and 2002 against the 92-year-old actress on Oct. 5 in the Los Angeles County Recorder of Deeds.

Miss Gabor’s lawyer Chris Fields estimates that she lost about $7 million in Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and says the tax bill is part of the fallout and that third-party money managers invested Miss Gabor’s money with Madoff.

Miss Gabor and husband Frederic von Anhalt are pulling together their resources and working out a payment plan with the IRS, the lawyer says.

Scientist is Belle

British scientist Brooke Magnanti has revealed she is Belle de Jour, the anonymous blogger whose accounts of life as a call girl were turned into a book series and TV show.

Miss Magnanti, 34, is quoted by the Sunday Times as saying she decided to reveal her secret because she was afraid an ex-boyfriend would expose her, Associated Press reports.

A child-health researcher at the University of Bristol in western England, Miss Magnanti says she turned to the sex trade in 2003 while finishing her Ph.D. and worked for an escort agency for more than a year.

Her blog about the experience formed the basis of three books and the TV series “Secret Diary of a Call Girl.” She says her colleagues have been “amazingly kind and supportive” about the news.

Briefly noted

• Former Czech President Vaclav Havel opened the 20th anniversary celebrations of the Velvet Revolution with a concert in a downtown Prague church. Performers included rocker Lou Reed, soprano Renee Fleming and folk singer Joan Baez, who sang “We Shall Overcome” in Czech and English. Guests included former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who was born in Prague, and video messages from President Obama, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

• French President Nicolas Sarkozy awarded U.S. actor and director Clint Eastwood one of France’s top honors — the rank of commander of the French Legion of Honor, hailing him Friday as a cinema legend and a symbol of the type of America that the French adored.

• Edis Kayalar, a German, was charged in federal court in Los Angeles on Thursday with trying to extort $100,000 from former supermodel Cindy Crawford and her husband over a photograph of their daughter gagged and bound to a chair. Mr. Kayalar was recently deported back to Germany and has not been arrested, Reuters news agency reports.

• Compiled from Web and wire reports